The Favoured Child (9 page)

And I knew how to ride her. I knew it as easily and as sweetly as I had known how to hold the reins to drive the carriage horse. It might have been that I had listened so intently to Richard’s lessons that I had learned to ride sitting on the fence. But when Scheherazade moved and I went with her, as smoothly as perfectly matched dancers, I knew it was something else. I came from a long line of famous horse riders, and to be on horseback in the Wideacre woods was my natural place. Driving a horse on Wideacre had been bliss indeed, but riding Scheherazade up a grassy track with the afternoon sun on my cheek was a most earthly paradise.

Except that Richard…with a sudden gasp I remembered that Richard was missing, perhaps lying somewhere hurt. Without meaning to signal to the horse, I had tensed, and instantly obedient Scheherazade broke into a trot, a springy pace which nearly unseated me. I grabbed on to the pommel of the saddle and gritted my teeth as I banged up and down in the saddle, sliding hopelessly from one side to another and trying to right myself. I could remember Grandpapa bellowing to Richard to rise and sit with the trot, and I tried, without much hope, to rise in the stirrups and to sit down again. Almost at once I caught the rhythm. Scheherazade was long-legged and her pace steady. The awful teeth-rattling bumping stopped and I felt safe again. We were travelling fast, too, and were nearly at the gate to the mill, and I sat down in the saddle and gently tightened the reins. Scheherazade slowed at once, and stopped at the garden gate of the miller’s house.

‘Miller Green! Miller Green!’ I called, giving him his title, though he had ground no wheat in ten years, not since the night when the hall had been burned and looters had robbed the grain wagons stored in his yard.

The door opened slowly. Old Mrs Green put her head out. ‘Not here,’ she said, surly. ‘They’re all at the fair, looking for work.’

She had been a proud woman once, mistress of the mill with her own pew in the church. The loss of their livelihood had broken her spirit. Four big sons in the house and a husband to feed, and no money coming in from any of them. A river flowed past the garden to turn the mill wheel, but there was no wheat to grind. Not one of them had seen farm meat on the table for ten years, nor fresh fruit except the wild berries in season, nor white flour once they had scraped the millstone clean of dust.

‘There’s been an accident,’ I called to her. ‘My cousin Richard may be lying hurt in the woods, or on the common. When your men come home, will you send them out to look for Richard, Mrs Green?’

She looked at me dully. ‘Miss Beatrice’s son?’ she asked me, and then she scowled. ‘Nay,’ she said with grim satisfaction. ‘I won’t do that. I wouldn’t send my men out to do a favour for the Laceys. Least of all when they come home tired after a day on the tramp looking for work, when there’s no work to be had.’

I stared at her blankly, with growing fright. If Richard was injured, perhaps with broken bones, he should be found at once. If Mrs Green would not help, if Acre would not help, it might take hours to find him. Without thinking of anything except the desperate need to get help to Richard, I dropped down from Scheherazade’s high back and looped her reins over the gate. Mrs Green was old, stooped, and I was lanky and growing tall for my age. I went up to her and she was barely a head taller than me. She looked down into my child’s face and saw an unchildlike determination.

‘He may be Beatrice’s-son,’ I said, ‘but he’s my cousin. And I love him more than anything else in the world. Please help him.’

Some of the hardness went out of her face when she saw me-not a Lacey on horseback, but a girl at her cottage door, white-faced, begging for aid.

‘Eh, well,’ she said resignedly. ‘They’ll be back within the hour. I dare say they’ll turn out for him then.’

I felt my eyes suddenly fill with tears of relief. ‘Thank you,’ I said huskily. Then I turned and walked down the little path and used her tumbledown garden wall as a mounting block to reach Scheherazade’s saddle high above me. I trotted back down the track to Acre and I knew she was watching and that the incomprehensible hardness had gone from her face.

Without thinking of it, I had been riding easily, confidently, and as we rounded the corner to Acre I sat down deeper in the saddle and let Scheherazade canter. We moved together, and I felt not a trace, not a flicker of fear, but only a delight in the rush of the wind and the thudding of her hooves and the sense of speed. We thundered up Acre lane like a regiment of cavalry, and I pulled her up at the smith’s yard with a yell of pure elation.

‘Ned Smith!’ I called, and he came out, throwing on his tattered apron, his thin face lit-up, hoping for work.

‘There’s no shoeing needed,’ I said quickly. ‘I am sorry. But there has been an accident, and Richard has come off his horse. John Dench is looking for him and he said you would help.’

The smith pulled his apron off again and tossed it over the empty anvil by the cold forge. ‘Aye,’ he said dully. ‘Some of the men will come out if they’re promised a penny for it.’

‘Yes,’ I said. Then I added awkwardly, ‘I am sorry there was no work for you today. I am sorry you heard the hooves and must have been hopeful. I am sorry we can pay no more than a penny a man.’

That brought his eyes up to my face. ‘Why should you care?’ he demanded coldly.

‘I am a Lacey,’ I said; and then, challenged by his stare, I went on, ‘I know it is all wrong now, but we were squires here. It is all wrong for the Laceys, and for Acre too, and I am sorry.’

His face warmed, but he did not smile. It was as though he
had forgotten how to smile. ‘Eh,’ he sighed, like a man grieving. But then he was generous to me. ‘You were a babe in arms,’ he said. ‘No blame for you. I’ll get the men out for you, and we’ll find your cousin. Don’t fret.’ I nodded. ‘Thank you,’ I said.

‘Are you all right on that mare?’ he asked as he suddenly noticed me riding astride with shortened stirrups.

I beamed at him. ‘Yes!’ I said triumphantly. ‘I have trotted and cantered. But I shall go carefully home.’

‘You ride like Miss Beatrice did,’ he said, half to himself. ‘And you have her smile too. For a moment, seeing you up there, smiling like that, it was like the old days, before she went bad.’

‘Before she went bad.’ I heard his words over again in my head, and they sounded like a spell which might make everything suddenly clear to me. ‘She went bad,’ I repeated aloud. ‘What do you mean? My Aunt Beatrice was never bad.’

He gave me an ironic glance from under heavy dark brows. ‘No,’ he said. ‘That’s what they would have taught you, I dare say. We see it differently in Acre. But it’s an old tale, and little worth the telling.’

‘How do you see it in Acre?’ I asked. I was leaning forward in the saddle, staring at him as if he could explain so much. As if that one sentence about Beatrice’s smile before she went bad might tell me why we were so poor in the Dower House, and why the land around us had turned sour and grew nothing but weeds.

‘Not now,’ he said briefly, but I saw the closed-in look on his face which I saw on my mama when I asked her what went wrong with the Laceys and what caused the fire that night, all those years ago. ‘You’ve your cousin to think of now.’

I nodded. He was right. I shook my head to clear it of the mystery, and then I used my heel and the lightest of touches on the reins to turn Scheherazade and head for home.

The Acre lane is hard-packed mud, no good for cantering, and we took it at a brisk exhilarating trot. But the drive to Wideacre Hall is seldom used and is overgrown and grassy, and I could
loosen her reins a little and let her stride lengthen into a smooth canter again. I did not check her until I saw the garden gate and Mama standing in the front garden; I thundered up, my hat tumbled behind me, my hair flying out over my shoulders, my eyes bright.

‘Julia!’ she exclaimed in horror. ‘What on earth…?’

‘Dench was driving me home when we found Scheherazade,’ I said breathlessly. ‘He took the carriage horse to ride and look for Richard and sent me to Acre to turn out the men, and then come home to you. Richard’s not here, is he? He didn’t walk home, did he?’

‘No, I was starting to worry,’ Mama said. ‘Oh! How dreadful if he should be badly hurt. But, Julia! You riding! How do you know how?’

‘I just did it, Mama!’ I said triumphantly. ‘As soon as I was on her back, I just knew how to do it! And she is so good, she is so gentle. I knew I would not come to any harm!’

‘But the men from Acre…’ said Mama, distressed. ‘Whoever did you speak to in Acre?’

‘Mrs Green at the mill, and then Ned Smith,’ I said. ‘They both said they’d help.’

‘Oh, dear,’ said Mama, overwhelmed by the sight of me thundering down the drive, riding like a poor girl with my skirts bunched up and straddling the horse, and by the impropriety of my giving orders in Acre, but most of all by her rising fear for Richard.

But then I saw her shoulders go back and her voice grow firm as she took command. ‘Take the horse to the stables and tell Jem to ride over to Havering,’ she said. ‘Tell him to tell her ladyship that Richard may be hurt and ask if we may borrow the carriage. You come inside at once.’

She ran up the path to the house and I heard her ring the bell for Stride. Then I just leaned forward slightly, and lovely Scheherazade knew what I wanted and walked towards the stable, her ears pricked for her stall. In the stable yard I swung down from her back and meant to land lightly on my feet. But as soon
as my feet touched the paving slabs my knees turned to water and buckled under me so that, instead of confidently handing the reins to Jem, I could only slump in a crumpled heap at his feet, half laughing and half crying with the pain. Jem scooped me up and sat me on the mounting block, then lengthened Scheherazade’s stirrups so he could ride her over to the hall.

‘Will you be all right?’ he said, eyeing me. ‘Maybe I should see you into the house.’

‘I’m all right,’ I lied. In truth my arms and legs felt like pounded jelly. I ached in every bone, and my skin, where I had sat on the saddle, was scalding as if I had been burned. Jem rode Scheherazade up to the gate to the back garden and yelled through the archway for Mrs Gough. While his back was turned, I cautiously pulled up my skirt to see my legs. I felt I was bleeding, as if my legs were rubbed raw, but there were only a couple of red stripes where the saddle and the leathers had chafed me, and some wicked little red blood bruises where the soft skin had been trapped and pinched.

‘Gracious me!’ said Mrs Gough, standing over me, arms akimbo. ‘What a state you’re in, Miss Julia! Come inside this minute.’

I tried to rise to obey her, but as I did so, my knees gave way again, the ground beneath me looked like a series of steps, one level melting into another level. I looked up at Mrs Gough’s disapproving face and held out my hands to her. ‘I don’t feel very well,’ I said deprecatingly, and I dropped at her feet in a dead faint.

That was the end of my adventures for that day. Mrs Gough might be unsympathetic, but she was efficient. She had Stride carry me up the stairs to my bedroom, and sent up a bowl of soup with a dash of sherry in it, and a little bread. Despite my anxiety for Richard, I could not keep my eyes open and fell fast asleep.

And then I dreamed. A funny dream, all the events of the day mixed up and misunderstood, but with some feeling about them as if they were not me in the dream at all. A girl very like me. A
girl like me but more firmly rooted in Wideacre than I. A girl who would never have tolerated a bullying playmate, a girl who was afraid of nothing. Not a quiet girl, not a shy girl. Not a good indoors girl at all. A girl that I would have been if I had not been my mama’s child. Like me, but with none of the wildness stolen from her.

She was on horseback, on a bay pony, but his bright summer coat was like Scheherazade’s had been in the autumn sunlight. And she was riding not in the woods where I had been that day but up along the little bridle-track to the slopes of the downs. She was me, and when she urged her pony fast up the pale muddy track, it was my laugh I heard, and when they broke out of the trees at the top of the downs, it was my sigh of delight. I looked to my right and there was a flock of sheep which I knew were my sheep, with a shepherd raising a hand in a lazy greeting, and I rode over to him and told him that the sheep were to be washed in the Fenny this afternoon and he smiled and pulled his cap to me as though I were the squire himself and able to order things on the land as I pleased.

I squinted up at the bright cold sky and looked at the horizon as if I owned it and I said to him, ‘It will rain later’, and he nodded as if there could be no doubt that I was right. He smiled and said, ‘Yes, Miss Beatrice’, and waved to me as I rode away.

I turned over in my bed in my sleep, and I heard a voice in my sleep saying, ‘The favoured child. The favoured child. She always was the favoured child.’

I opened my eyes then and blinked, as confused as a barn owl wakened at midday. I looked around the bare sunny bedroom. The blank walls reassured me that it was nothing but a meaningless dream. The shadows on the pale plaster showed me that I had only been asleep for a few minutes. I put out a hand and touched the empty soup bowl. It was still warm. I thought of Richard and made to rise from the bed to see if he was safe home, but my head was so swimmy I lay back on the pillow again until the room should steady. And while I waited for my head to clear, I dropped off to sleep again like an exhausted child.

I slept until mid-afternoon, and so I missed all the excitement of Richard’s return home. Dench had found him and brought him into Acre, slumped across the carriage horse, with Dench leading. He had broken a collar-bone and his left arm, and Dench had torn up his own shirt to make a temporary sling. Mama had sent the Havering carriage to Acre, and Ned the Smith and one of the Green lads had lifted Richard into it, tucked him up under one of the carriage rugs and sent him home. He was not in pain on the jolting journey, because Dench had given him some laudanum. Mrs Green had run out with the tiny precious phial as they walked past the mill. She had saved it from the bailiffs, resisted the temptation to sell it for food; and then given it away.